Arnold Schwarzenegger - Total Recall - My Unbelievably True Life Story

I was thrilled to see all of this unfold around me. Just as my stunt teacher predicted back in LA, the movie machinery was working on my behalf. I was Conan, and millions of dollars were being spent to make me shine. The movie had other important characters, of course, but in the end it was all geared to making me look like a real warrior. The sets were built for that purpose too. For the first time, I felt like the star.

It was different from being a bodybuilding champion. Millions of people were going to watch this movie, whereas in bodybuilding the biggest live audience was five thousand and the biggest TV audience was one million to two million. This was big . Movie magazines were going to write about Conan , the Calendar section in the LA Times was going to write about it, and magazines and newspapers around the world were going to review it and analyze it—and debate about it, no doubt, because what Milius envisioned was so violent.

Maria came to visit for a few days at the end of December after spending Christmas with her parents. This gave me a chance to introduce her to the crew and the cast, so she wouldn’t think I’d dropped off the face of the earth. She got a laugh out of how I’d already assembled a whole posse of friends from the muscle world: not just the Danes but also Franco, because I’d arranged a small part for him.

I was glad that Maria wasn’t still there when we started filming a week later. In the first scene we were scheduled to shoot, an unarmed Conan, newly released from slavery, is being chased by wolves across a rocky plain. He escapes by scrambling up an outcropping, where he will stumble upon the mouth of a tomb containing a sword. In preparation for this sequence, I’d been working every morning with the wolves, just to conquer my fear. The wolves were actually four German shepherds, but without telling me, Milius had ordered the stunt coordinator to rent animals that had some wolf in them. He thought that would heighten the realism. “We’ll time it all out,” he promised me. “You’ll already be running when we release the dogs, and they won’t have enough time to cross the field and get you before you’re up the rocks.”

On the morning we shot the scene, they sewed raw meat into the bearskin on my back to attract the dogs. The cameras rolled, and I sprinted across the field. But the trainer let the dogs loose too soon, and I didn’t have enough of a head start. The wolf pack caught me before I could get all the way up the rocks. They bit at my pants and dragged me down off the rock, and I fell ten feet onto my back. I tried to stand and rip off the bearskin but fell over into a thornbush. The trainer called out a command, and the dogs froze and stood near me, drooling.

I’m lying there full of thorns and bleeding from a gash where I’d landed on a rock. Milius was not sympathetic. “Now you know what the film is going to be like,” he said. “This is what Conan went through!” I went off to get stitches, and when I saw him later at lunch, the director was in a great mood. “We got the shot. We’re off to a great start,” he said. The next day I ended up needing more stitches after I cut my forehead leaping into a rocky pool. When Milius saw the blood running, he said, “Who did that makeup? It’s terrific. Looks like real blood.” He refused to think about what would have happened to the production if I’d been crippled or killed. But of course there was no stunt double because it would have been very difficult to find anyone who had a body like mine.

The rest of the week was devoted to an elaborate action sequence from much later in the plot. In our warehouse outside Madrid, the crews had constructed the Orgy Chamber of Thulsa Doom’s mountain temple. From the outside, the warehouse was a big, drab two-story building made of corrugated steel and surrounded by a dusty parking lot, tents, and a crude sign that said “Conan” in red paint. But inside, after you wended your way through the makeup, costume, and prop departments, you were transported into the debauched splendor of the sorcerer’s cannibalistic snake cult. The Orgy Chamber was a high-ceilinged hall with marble terraces and staircases lit by torchlight and draped in beautiful satin and silk, with a dozen naked women and their consorts sprawled on thick cushions in a central pit, dozing and reveling. In the center of the pit rose a pink and gray twelve-foot marble pillar with four giant snake heads carved on top. The feast was being served by attendants from a bubbling cauldron in which you could see severed hands and other body parts.

The script called for Conan, Valeria, and Subotai to burst in on this orgy, slay the guards, and seize the wayward princess who had fallen under Thulsa Doom’s spell. The guards, of course, were supposed to be subhuman thugs, some of them wearing reptile masks, and I was stripped to the waist with my face and torso painted in fearsome black camouflage stripes that looked like lightning bolts. Sandahl and Jerry were painted in stripes too. It felt fantastic putting our weapons training into action, and Milius was pleased as we worked our way through dozens of shots.

Movie sets are noisy places between takes, with people talking, equipment clattering, and crews bustling around. On the fourth morning, we were getting ready for a shot in Thulsa Doom’s private alcove, carved high in the wall of the Orgy Chamber, when somebody said, “Dino is here,” and I heard the commotion suddenly stop. I looked down the broad sweep of stairs, and there, in the pit, amid all the naked girls, was our legendary producer making his first appearance on the set. De Laurentiis was immaculately groomed, wearing the most elegant suit with a beautiful cashmere overcoat, which, being Italian, he draped over his shoulders like a cape.

He stood surveying the whole scene and then climbed up the steps to where we stood. Maybe there were twenty steps, but to me it seemed like a hundred, because it took a long time. I just watched him come closer and closer, with those naked women in the background. Finally he reached the top and walked right to me.

“Schwarzenegger,” he said, “you are Conan.” And he made a snappy turn and walked back down and off the set.

Milius had been near the camera, and the microphones were on. He came over to me. “I heard that,” he said. “You realize that’s the greatest compliment you’re ever gonna get from this guy? This morning he watched the three days of film we’ve shot, and now he’s a believer.”

I felt this was Dino’s way of telling me I was off the hook for calling him short four years ago. From that point on, he would come to Spain once a month or so and invite me to his hotel for coffee. Slowly, we warmed to each other.

Dino delegated the actual nuts and bolts of producing Conan to his daughter Raffaella and to Buzz Feitshans, who’d worked with Milius on earlier films. Raffaella was a pistol: she was his middle daughter with the Italian actress Silvana Mangano, and she’d known she wanted to be a producer from the time she was a kid. Even though Raffaella was only Maria’s age, Dino had been teaching her the ropes for ten years, and this was already her second major feature.

I’d learned enough about movie production by now to be impressed with the job that she and Buzz did. They really had to scramble to find a country to shoot in after the Yugoslavia plan fell through. Every country has a film commission, and typically, when you produce a film, you start by calling and saying, “We want to make this movie in your country. What can you do for us?” In the case of Conan , Spain jumped at the chance. The commission told Raffaella and Buzz, “First, we have a great warehouse you can make into a studio. There’s running water, flush toilets, and showers. There’s room for the generators you’re going to need. We have an extra warehouse you can also rent, plus an empty hangar on an air force base. We have a luxury apartment complex in Madrid that’s perfect for the actors and senior crew. It’s attached to a five-star hotel, so you’ll have restaurants and room service always available. There’s room for your production offices too, right around the corner.”